Bryn Mawr Classical Review
95.12.09

Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry
of
Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 259. ISBN
0- 22-631630-0.

Reviewed by
Gregory Crane, Tufts University.

I would like in this review to draw attention to a new book which,
although it does not primarily concern itself with antiquity, nevertheless
has much to offer those of us who study how power is concentrated and
disseminated in the classical period. Robert Hariman's Political
Style: The Artistry of Power uses subtle analyses of four texts to
articulate four different political styles: Machiavelli's The
Prince introduces the realist style, Ryszard Kapuscinski's account
of the last days of Haile Selassie's rule serves as a case study in
courtly style, while Cicero's Letters and Kafka's The
Castle represent republican and bureaucratic styles. It is hard to
assign Hariman to a neat academic pigeon-hole: he is Professor of Rhetoric
and Communication Studies and Endowment Professor of the Humanities at
Drake University. He certainly lives up to the expectations of rhetoric,
for his writing engages complex issues, does not shirk from sophisticated
topics and nevertheless remains eminently readable. As an expert on
communications, he has a keen eye for the mechanics whereby humans share
ideas. As a professor of the humanities, he uses texts, but his reading,
far from being a reductive scavenger-hunt for data, enhances the
complexity of every text on which it focuses.

I found each of the
four
main chapters delightful both because of their content and because of
their methodology, for in each case Hariman interweaves his canonical
texts with more recent but equally elusive phenomena: few would probably
link Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, the Emperor Pu Yi and Haile Selassie, but the
courtly style illuminates the practices of each; Cicero, Thomas Jefferson,
and Vaclav Havel appear as men who are not only politicians but actors
struggling to "craft a persona emblematic of public life" (5) and to
establish a language appropriate for political discourse in a republican
world -- a sympathetic treatment of all three men by a left-of-center
writer
is worth the price of admission. While the soulless and depersonalized
bureaucracy that haunts Kafka's work may seem all too familiar to anyone
who has wrestled with an American Registry of Motor Vehicles or Post
Office, the student of ancient bureaucracies from Mesopotamia to Rome will
probably find this section of interest as well. Hannah Arendt stressed the
close relationship between totalitarianism and the anonymity of
bureaucratic control.1 She saw
totalitarian rule as it emerged in Nazi
Germany and Stalinist Russia as typically and distinctly modern, but the
basic elements of totalitarianism appear already in fifth century
Athens,2 and the student of classical
Greece may also find Hariman's
views on bureaucratic style useful. The chapter on the "courtly style,"
with its case studies from the Ethiopian court and its forays into the
ostensibly anti-courtly modern world, is an excellent piece of work: those
trying to understand the role of Demos in Aristophanes'
Knights would do well to consider Hariman on the body of the
sovereign in courtly style. Anyone who reads Hariman's description of
Selassie's "pee lackey" will be reminded that the grotesqueries to which
Kleon and the Sausage Seller stoop are not merely the stuff of comedy. As
a student of fifth-century ideologies and especially of Thucydides,
however, I found the chapter on the realist style (which makes only brief
direct references to classical antiquity) particularly germane, and it is
to this that I will turn for the remainder of this review.

The
Realist Style

Hariman's chapter on Machiavelli is the best
description of political realism that I have yet had the good fortune to
find. A few months ago, I ran into a classicist from another institution
who also turned out to have been studying the relationship between
Thucydides and the tradition of political realism. In exchanging
impressions, we both admitted to one another -- not without some
relief -- that neither of us had been able to muster much enthusiasm for
the
extensive and often eloquent bibliography composed by political
philosophers and experts in international relations. Several scholars with
an interest both in political theory and in Thucydides have recently
helped to bridge the gap,3 but Hariman's
analysis of the realist style
is both penetrating and succinct.

Students of realism have
generally
sought to enumerate a set of assumptions common to realists of various
types: realists, for example, view the state as the primary actor; they
see political and international relations as a competition between
rational actors maximizing their advantage; they separate interstate
conflict from conventional norms of justice; above all, they see power,
however power may be constructed in a given society, as a universal object
of competition, and the hunger for power becomes a common denominator that
makes cross-cultural comparison possible. Different realists vary this set
of assumptions, which come to assume the role of litmus tests popular in
American politics: one text even helpfully includes a table of "realist
assumptions" and who shares them4 -- thus
further reducing the concept
of realism to a checklist. Since many people use these sets of assumptions
to define their relationship to realist thought, these labels constitute
an important and legitimate hermeneutic tool, but they do not tell the
whole story any more than do the labels by which any group, western or
non-western, ancient or modern, "dominant" or "marginal," defines itself.

Hariman's analysis leaves these well-known labels aside. Instead,
his
model of realist style is much more powerful, and its power lies in the
attention which he pays to text and language and to style -- elements
which
realist authors have (for reasons Hariman pursues) generally avoided.
Hariman provides a different and (in my view) much more compelling account
of Machiavelli, his influence and, indeed, a central force in modern
political thought precisely because he does not marginalize language in
his search for some "scientific" truth. Many traditional realists give the
impression that, although they sense the limits of human foresight and
doubt that we will ever have a mathematically exact model of human
behavior, they would be delighted if such a thing were possible. It is as
if they admired Thucydides' history, but wished they could replace him
with a political equivalent to Euclid's Elements, with its
elegant and rigorous progression from axioms to theorems.

The
Prince, for all its distinctness, belongs to a well established
genre in which wise men offer public advice to princes -- there were many
such texts in the renaissance and Hariman traces the tradition to
Isocrates' letter To Nicocles (those with an affinity for the
fifth century may be tempted to add a number of Pindar's
epinicia, and the genre could easily be expanded further).
But Machiavelli turned the conventional genre on its head: every other
renaissance author had grounded his authority in references to past texts.
In Erasmus' Institutio Principis Christiani, for example,
"the dead have become exempla, rhetorical figures having as
much presence as the living and more authority, and any distinction
between ancient author, prior ruler, and current prince is, well,
something not quite determined (27)." When Augustino Nifo rewrote (and one
can say plagiarized) Machiavelli, he added all the references to classical
authors that Machiavelli had chosen to exclude, thus bringing The
Prince into line with practice of the time and illustrating the gap
which separated The Prince from the conventions of its genre.

The issue went beyond including a few more footnotes. Machiavelli's
peculiar model of power is inextricably linked to his marginalization of
past texts: "Whereas Isocrates understood power as an effective text, and
implied that rulers can only rule effectively if they, like speakers,
adapt themselves to the restraints imposed by their audiences, Machiavelli
developed the modern metaphysics of power by writing in a manner that
subverted the authority of textual consciousness, freeing those who would
rule from the constraints of eloquence (23-24)." Hariman goes on to state
that, for Machiavelli, "the essence of his subject is something that is
correctly communicated only through artlessness, he abjures explicit
textuality because power is not itself textual. As rhetoric is extrinsic
to reality, so power becomes objectified, something existing independently
of language, texts, and textual authority (24)." The realist style,
according to Hariman, requires the pose of the artless reporter:
realists
must minimize their use of explicit rhetorical form precisely because they
ground their authority in a clear understanding of the "real" world.

Hariman places Machiavelli's vision of power at the center of
modernity.
This is, of course, nothing new, but Hariman does not content himself with
references to the separation of morality from statecraft or the emphasis
upon physical force. Hariman sees the contempt for textuality as a force
that continues to inform political discourse: "Machiavelli's technique of
denigrating other political texts as texts, necessarily alienated in a
material world, has become a rhetoric of self-assertion that now is
reproduced endlessly. So it is that diplomats can denigrate human rights
as slogans, corporate executives can dismiss worker-safety laws as
bureaucratic red-tape, and journalists can debunk political speech as mere
rhetoric. In every case, understanding the modern age requires reading
Machiavelli not only as the proponent of self-assertion for the few
fortunate enough to have lo stato within their reach, but
also as the modern writer schooling all of us to attain self- assertion by
overruling our texts (42-43)." "When political intelligence is represented
as the calculation of forces in a real world, then political rhetoric
becomes its shadow and political commentary the futile attempt to discern
the light in the shadows. Thus, his strategies for aggrandizing his own
text ultimately work against him. By setting his discourse over the other
writers, Machiavelli set in motion an attack upon all political discourse
that has to destroy his own position. The Prince is not
enigmatic, strictly speaking, but the experience of reading it is
paradoxical. Machiavelli's reader loses through the act of reading itself
the resources for integrating this political treatise into the political
world (48-49)."

It is not hard to see the irony of the
Machiavellian
position. On the one hand, Machiavelli undercuts the authority of his own
text, for, if texts are secondary to reality, then The Prince
too constitutes at best a negative hermeneutic that explodes all texts
(including itself). On the other hand, Machiavelli's text itself became a
canonical document (for some the founding text) of political science, and
it continues to be studied and cited. The realist text, with its disdain
for rhetoric and the tactics of persuasion, can be the most rhetorical and
persuasive of all. Marx, for example, rejected the airy phantasms of Hegel
and Feuerbach, striving to base his philosophy on "facts" and "data," but
his work engendered in part a vast and stultifying sacred literature that
did as much violence to empirical study as any fundamentalist religious
tract.

The strength of Hariman's analysis of realism lies in its
commitment to texts and to the real impact which they, by their style and
particular form, exert upon the world. Most writers on realism have taken
for granted, and thus readily overlooked, a central point that The
Prince set out to make: they assume that political
science/philosophy concerns itself with a real world and that texts are,
at best, a means by which to apprehend this real world more clearly.
Hariman, with his sensitivity to rhetoric and to the subtleties of
communication, resists this. While he does not go so far as to imply that
the medium is the message, his analysis insists that medium and message
cannot be separated: few writers in any field would challenge this
statement, but scholarly practice often fails to give proper weight to
medium and message. The text is important because, whether or not there
exists a sovereign Platonic reality "out there," the text allows us to
interpret reality for ourselves and to extract meaning from events.

Hariman's analysis places at least one traditional question in a
new
light. Machiavelli's yearning for a scientific realism is related to the
transformation of European science. If Machiavelli turned his gaze from
ancient authors, the anatomists would likewise begin relying less on Galen
and more on direct observation (although Galenic phantoms, such as organ
descriptions based on animal rather than human anatomy would remain in the
literature well after scientists had begun dissecting human cadavers).
Even more intriguing, I think, would be an investigation into the
rediscovery of Greek mathematics. The axioms and postulates of Euclid do
in fact constitute a language that generates "knowledge" as certain as any
human system ever has. Parallels to medicine might suggest that
Machiavelli simply wished to replace textual authority with a pure
empiricism. The mathematical model, by contrast, suggests movement in a
different direction. Instead of eliminating language as a barrier, many
political scientists since Machiavelli have wished to replace the inchoate
and fuzzy language of traditional texts with a rigorous and reliable
scientific discourse. Rhetoric is thus problematic not because language
and textuality per se are flawed but because rhetoric
embodies in itself the errant and unreliable tendencies of natural
language.

Hariman's analysis is valuable not simply because it
provides a
strong reading of Machiavelli and subsequent realist thought, but also
because many of his insights shed light upon Thucydides as well -- indeed,
instructors teaching Thucydides might use the chapter on Machiavelli as a
starting point for discussion of a realist author.

First,
Machiavelli
seeks to define "his subject against an alternative; this technique
persuades the reader of the artlessness not only of Machiavelli's text but
of power itself (5)." The apparent candor of Thucydides and the author's
self-effacement are among the most carefully studied aspects of
Thucydidean style. Thucydides attempts to present a narrative that
perfectly mirrors its subject and presents "just the facts,"5 but the
apparent artlessness of his narrative, whether consciously contrived or
not,6 contributes to its subtle
power.7

Second, Hariman describes
Machiavelli's view of power as "topographic," and illustrates this outlook
with a quote from George Kennan's Machiavellian analysis of Soviet Power:
Russian "political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly,
wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is
to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in
the basin of world power (36)." "The shift from textuality to topography,"
according to Hariman, "creates a gravitational pull toward imperial
formulations. When power is understood in terms of speech, it is checked,
relational, circumscribed by the exigencies of being heard by an audience
or understood by a reader, and always awaiting a reply. When power is
understood in terms of vision it is unchecked, expansive, requiring only
the movement of the person seeing to acquire the means for complete
control of the environment. Machiavelli is comprehensible as the exponent
of the modern state not because he described the state but because he
composed a discourse capable of carrying the expansive potential in state
power (41-42)."

The irresistible fascination of power is, of
course, a
major theme throughout Thucydides' History. At the climax of
the Funeral Oration (Thucydides' closest approximation to idealist
discourse), Perikles calls upon the Athenians to lose themselves in
worship of Athens' power (2.43). In the opening section we hear that fear,
not loyalty and friendship, allowed Agamemnon to assemble the expedition
against Troy (1.9). In their first speech of the History, the
Athenians argue that the quest for power -- the combined influence of
advantage, fear and honor -- constitute natural influences: the Athenian
acquisition of maintenance of empire is thus no more than human and should
arouse no ill will (1.76). The "topographic" model of power as an
irresistible "gravitational" pull is very similar to the model of Athenian
acquisitiveness presented by the Corinthians at 1.67-71 and the more
general analysis of imperialism by Alcibiades at 6.16-18.

Third,
the
rejection of textuality may at first seem not to apply to Thucydides. When
Erasmus wrote the Institutio Principis Christiani, he drew
upon a continuous written textual tradition that was two thousand years
old. "Learned" texts of this type were inconceivable in the fifth century
BCE, because the written textual tradition in general and prose in
particular were still in their infancy: Stewart Flory has argued strongly
that Herodotus composed the first book-length prose text.8 Thucydides
himself did much (perhaps too much) to establish conventions for the prose
monograph.

Nevertheless, thin as the textual tradition may have
been,
comparatively speaking, Thucydides establishes for himself a position much
like that which Hariman attributes to Machiavelli. Thucydides opens his
history with a revisionist analysis of the distant past in which he
dismisses heroes and heroic poets as well, and where Homer comes in for
explicit attack. Recent as prose writing may have been, Thucydides refers
(disparagingly) to his predecessors, citing Hellanicus (Thuc. 1.97.2), and
the famous boast at 1.22 that his history will be an "heirloom for all
time" glances defensively at unnamed others who compose to give pleasure
rather than instruction. Most readers have felt that Herodotus (never
explicitly mentioned) looms over Thucydides' text.9 Thucydides'
insistence at 1.22 on direct observation, cross- checking and analysis and
his suspicion of orality reflect a compulsion to base his words on some
tangible reality.10

Fourth, I would
like to conclude with the tension
that Hariman locates in Machiavelli's realist style. "When political
intelligence is represented as the calculation of forces in a real world,
then political rhetoric becomes its shadow and political commentary the
futile attempt to discern the light in the shadows. Thus, his strategies
for aggrandizing his own text ultimately work against him. By setting his
discourse over the other writers, Machiavelli set in motion an attack upon
all political discourse that has to destroy his own position. The
Prince is not enigmatic, strictly speaking, but the experience of
reading it is paradoxical. Machiavelli's reader loses through the act of
reading itself the resources for integrating this political treatise into
the political world (48-49)."

The parallel with Thucydides is not,
I
think, as close in this case as in the others, but the general
problem -- the inherent contradiction of the realist text -- confronts
both
writers. Many, if not most, of those who have studied Thucydides closely
have come away with the suspicion that he never resolved in his own mind
the tension between language and reality, even between logos
and ergon (or "realism" and "idealism," to use two
anachronistic terms). The Athenians not only dominate the
History. They also approach more closely than any other
actors a heroic status -- at least by Thucydides own terms -- for the
Athenians, as they move from their speech at Sparta to the Mytilenean
debate and finally arrive at the Melian dialogue -- bring their words and
actions into progressively closer alignment. Even so, Athenian realism
emerges as yet another rhetorical strategy and a questionable guide to
decision making. The Athenian Euphemus delivers perhaps the most ironic
speech in the entire history and in so doing dramatizes the uncertainty of
the realist style. Pretending to a candor that is false and a realism that
seeks to deceive, he tells the Sicilians that Athens can have no designs
upon Sicily because imperialist expansion is not in Athens' interest
(6.76). The irony is that Euphemus, although consciously lying (the
Athenian expedition was sent to conquer Sicily), is actually telling the
truth, for, in the event, the Athenian imperialist expedition is a
catastrophe from which Athens never fully recovers. Realism may have its
attractions, but reality is hard to pin down.

[7] This
is the main theme of Connor's famous article on Thucydides as a
post-modernist writer (Connor, R. (1977). "A Post-Modernist Thucydides."
CJ 72, 289-298) and a major topic of his book (Connor, W. R.
(1984). Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press).